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I examine the role of context as a rhetorical trope. As a rhetorical trope, context tends to fix complex practices in single places, which allows for the celebration of the authentic or original. Further, it privileges production while masking complex practices of circulation and consumption while simultaneously constraining seemingly infinite possibilities into finite frames that then become static and naturalized. These practices need to be examined in order to understand how power is being enacted via the trope of context for the purposes of control and limitation. I argue throughout that these power dynamics need to be addressed--that the ethics of context need to consider who or what is empowered, who or what is disempowered, and decide whether such a situational power dynamic is acceptable or should be changed.I move through the dissertation by first presenting the metaphors of context--maps, frames, and landscapes--discussing the ways in which each of these metaphors control and limit context and therefore control and limit the text. I then analyze the textual and rhetorical context traditions to illuminate the ways in which these two prevalent traditions assume a static and constant original context to which a text belongs. The constant appeal to an origin, I argue, invests a text or artifact with historical aura, which is often used to obscure and limit other critical engagements with a text thus controlling a text's or artifact's possible meanings and transformative power. Following this exploration, I turn my attention to contexts as consumable commodities. I argue that contexts as rhetorical tropes are divorced from the dialectical process of meaning making from a text and can therefore exist as its own entity. As such, contexts can be marketed to and consumed by people. An ethics of context, I conclude, would challenge the god term that context has become in order to expose the power and ideological control that is exerted via a deployment of rhetorical contexts. Such an ethics would address, again, the dialectical formation of texts and contexts--texts define contexts; contexts define texts; they are inseparable.

This dissertation examines the production and consumption of nature in middle-class American holidays. Focusing on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it follows the creation of new symbols and practices associated with Easter, the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving and Christmas. In each of these holidays, members of the middle class used nature to narrate their new identity as Americans belonging less to local, regional, or ethnic communities and more to the nuclear family and the nation. In Thanksgiving, the turkey became an important symbol in the antebellum era, the same period in which the Easter rabbit was born, the Fourth of July picnic became popular, and the Christmas tree rose to prominence. These trends resulted from the middle-class desire to make the home an idealized private life complete with its own rituals and symbols that separated it from the public life of the street. While the middle class retreated into its imagined private sphere, it did so while simultaneously claiming that their families represented the core building blocks of the nation. By conflating family and nation, the middle class generated a large demand for the physical goods that made such symbolic meaning manifest--in particular, Thanksgiving turkeys and Christmas trees. Reproducing these plants and animals, however, created agroecological problems, including crop diseases. While middle-class family holidays reinforce the scales of popular culture and mass agriculture, they do so only tenuously.

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